This file describes changes relevant to all users that are made in each released version of restic from the perspective of the user. Important Changes in 0.X.Y ========================== * We've added a local cache for metadata so that restic doesn't need to load all metadata (snapshots, indexes, ...) from the repo each time it starts. By default the cache is active, but there's a new global option `--no-cache` that can be used to disable the cache. By deafult, the cache a standard cache folder for the OS, which can be overridden with `--cache-dir`. The cache will automatically populate, indexes and snapshots are saved as they are loaded. Cache directories for repos that haven't been used recently can automatically be removed by restic with the `--cleanup-cache` option. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1040 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/29 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/738 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/282 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1287 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1436 * A related change was to by default create pack files in the repo that contain either data or metadata, not both mixed together. This allows easy caching of only the metadata files. The next run of `restic prune` will untangle mixed files automatically. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1265 * The Google Cloud Storage backend no longer requires the service account to have the `storage.buckets.get` permission ("Storage Admin" role) in `restic init` if the bucket already exists. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1281 * Added support for rate limiting through `--limit-upload` and `--limit-download` flags. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1216 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1336 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1358 * Failed backend requests are now automatically retried. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1353 * We've added the `dump` command which prints a file from a snapshot to stdout. This can e.g. be used to restore files read with `backup --stdin`. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/510 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1346 Small changes ------------- * The directory structure in the fuse mount now exposes a symlink `latest` which points to the latest snapshot in that particular directory. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1249 * The option `--compact` was added to the `forget` command to provide the same compact view as the `snapshots` command. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1269 * We've re-enabled a workaround for `minio-go` (the library we're using to access s3 backends), this reduces memory usage. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1256 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1267 * The sftp backend now prompts for the password if a password is necessary for login. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/448 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1270 * The `generate` command has been added, which replaces the now removed commands `manpage` and `autocomplete`. This release of restic contains the most recent manpages in `doc/man` and the auto-completion files for bash and zsh in `doc/bash-completion.sh` and `doc/zsh-completion.zsh` https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1274 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1282 * A bug was discovered in the library we're using to access Backblaze, it now reuses already established TCP connections which should be a lot faster and not cause network failures any more. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1291 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1301 * Another bug in the `forget` command caused `prune` not to be run when `--prune` was specified without a policy, e.g. when only snapshot IDs that should be forgotten are listed manually. This is corrected now. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1317 * The `check` command now explicetly prints `No errors were found` when no errors could be found. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1319 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1303 * The fuse mount now has an `ids` subdirectory which contains the snapshots below their (short) IDs. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1102 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1299 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1320 * The `backup` command was improved, it now caches the result of excludes for a directory. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1271 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1326 * We've added the `--cacert` option which can be used to pass one (or more) CA certificates to restic. These are used in addition to the system CA certificates to verify HTTPS certificates (e.g. for the REST backend). https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1114 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1276 * When the list of files/dirs to be saved is read from a file with `--files-from`, comment lines (starting with `#`) are now ignored. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1367 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1368 Important Changes in 0.7.3 ========================== * For large backups stored in Google Cloud Storage, the `prune` command fails because listing only returns the first 1000 files. This has been corrected, no data is lost in the process. In addition, a plausibility check was added to `prune`. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1246 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1247 Important Changes in 0.7.2 ========================== * We've added an official docker image and a Dockerfile to build this image in `docker/`. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1061 * The git repository layout was changed to resemble the layout typically used in Go projects, we're not using `gb` for building restic any more and vendoring the dependencies is now taken care of by `dep`. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1126 * We now support saving backups on Google Cloud Storage. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1134 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1052 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/211 * We've added support for Microsoft Azure Blob Storage as a restic backend. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1149 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1059 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/609 * In the course of supporting Microsoft Azure Blobe Storage Go 1.8 is now a requirement to build restic. * The `restore` command has been improved: When dirs are excluded (or not included) in a restore, they are not loaded from the repo any more. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1044 * Name collisions are now resolved by appending a counter. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1179 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1209 Small changes ------------- * The `key` command now prompts for a password even if the original password to access a repo has been specified via the `RESTIC_PASSWORD` environment variable or a password file. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1132 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1133 * Properly report errors when reading files with exclude patterns. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1144 * We now automatically generate man pages for all restic commands, see the subdir `doc/man`. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/697 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1147 * The `key remove` command was corrected and now works as documented. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1164 * When a restic command other than `init` is used with a local repository and the repository directory does not exist, restic creates the directory structure. That's an error, only the `init` command should create the dir. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1167 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1182 * Restic now prints stats on all BSD systems (not only on darwin) when SIGINFO is received (usually when ctrl+t is pressed). https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1203 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1082#issuecomment-326279920 * Since a few releases restic had the ability to write profiling files for memory and CPU usage when `debug` is enabled. It was discovered that when restic is interrupted (ctrl+c is pressed), the proper shutdown hook is not run. This is now corrected. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1191 * A new option `--exclude-caches` was added that allows excluding cache directories (that are tagged as such). This is a special case of a more generic option `--exclude-if-present` which excludes a directory if a file with a specific name (and contents) is present. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/317 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1170 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1224 * The `forget` command now has an option `--group-by` that allows flexible grouping policies. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1196 * The date and time restic records for a new backup can now be specified externally by passing `--time` to the `backup` command. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1205 * The option `--compact` was added to the `snapshots` command to get a better overview of the snapshots in a repo. It limits each snapshot to a single line. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1218 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1223 Important Changes in 0.7.1 ========================== * The `migrate` command for chaning the `s3legacy` layout to the `default` layout for s3 backends has been improved: It can now be restarted with `restic migrate --force s3_layout` and automatically retries operations on error. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1073 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1075 Small changes ------------- * The local and sftp backends now create the subdirs below `data/` on open/init. This way, restic makes sure that they always exist. This is connected to an issue for the sftp server: https://github.com/restic/rest-server/pull/11#issuecomment-309879710 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1055 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1077 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1105 * When no S3 credentials are specified in the environment variables, restic now tries to load credentials from an IAM instance profile when the s3 backend is used. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1067 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1086 * On Darwin and FreeBSD, restic now prints stats when SIGINFO is received (usually when ctrl+t is pressed). https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1082 * The dependencies have been updated. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1108 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1124 * A bug was found (and corrected) in the index rebuilding after prune, which led to indexes which include blobs that were not present in the repo any more. There were already checks in place which detected this situation and aborted with an error message. A new run of either `prune` or `rebuild-index` corrected the index files. This is now fixed and a test has been added to detect this. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1115 * Errors for chmod() on Unix for filesystems which do not support it (e.g. smb mounted via gvfs) are now ignored. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1080 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1112 * The semantic for the `--tags` option to `forget` and `snapshots` was clarified: https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1081 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1090 Important Changes in 0.7.0 ========================== * New "swift" backend: A new backend for the OpenStack Swift cloud storage protocol has been added, https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Swift https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/975 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/648 * New "b2" backend: A new backend for Backblaze B2 cloud storage service has been added, https://www.backblaze.com https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/512 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/978 * Improved performance for the `find` command: Restic recognizes paths it has already checked for the files in question, so the number of backend requests is reduced a lot. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/989 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/993 * Improved performance for the fuse mount: Listing directories which contain large files now is significantly faster. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/998 * The default layout for the s3 backend is now `default` (instead of `s3legacy`). Also, there's a new `migrate` command to convert an existing repo, it can be run like this: `restic migrate s3_layout` https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/965 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1004 * The fuse mount now has two more directories: `tags` contains a subdir for each tag, which in turn contains only the snapshots that have this tag. The subdir `hosts` contains a subdir for each host that has a snapshot, and the subdir contains the snapshots for that host. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/636 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1050 Small changes ------------- * For the s3 backend we're back to using the high-level API the s3 client library for uploading data, a few users reported dropped connections (which the library will automatically retry now). https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1013 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1023 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1025 * The `prune` command has been improved and will now remove invalid pack files, for example files that have not been uploaded completely because a backup was interrupted. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1029 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1036 * restic now tries to detect when an invalid/unknown backend is used and returns an error message. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1021 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1070 Important Changes in 0.6.1 ========================== This is mostly a bugfix release and only contains small changes: * We've fixed a bug where `rebuild-index` would corrupt the index when used with the s3 backend together with the `default` layout. This is not the default setting. * Backends based on HTTP now allow several idle connections in parallel. This is especially important for the REST backend, which (when used with a local server) may create a lot connections and exhaust available ports quickly. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/985 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/986 * Regular status report: We've removed the status report that was printed every 10 seconds when restic is run non-interactively. You can still force reporting the current status by sending a `USR1` signal to the process. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/974 * The `build.go` now strips the temporary directory used for compilation from the binary. This is the first step in enabling reproducible builds. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/981 Important Changes in 0.6.0 ========================== Consistent forget policy ------------------------ The `forget` command was corrected to be more consistent in which snapshots are to be forgotten. It is possible that the new code removes more snapshots than before, so please review what would be deleted by using the `--dry-run` option. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/957 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/953 Unified repository layout ------------------------- Up to now the s3 backend used a special repository layout. We've decided to unify the repository layout and implemented the default layout also for the s3 backend. For creating a new repository on s3 with the default layout, use `restic -o s3.layout=default init`. For further commands the option is not necessary any more, restic will automatically detect the correct layout to use. A future version will switch to the default layout for new repositories. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/966 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/965 Memory and time improvements for the s3 backend ----------------------------------------------- We've updated the library used for accessing s3, switched to using a lower level API and added caching for some requests. This lead to a decrease in memory usage and a great speedup. In addition, we added benchmark functions for all backends, so we can track improvements over time. The Continuous Integration test service we're using (Travis) now runs the s3 backend tests not only against a Minio server, but also against the Amazon s3 live service, so we should be notified of any regressions much sooner. https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/962 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/960 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/946 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/938 https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/883